Prices
are dropping on tablets running Android 4.1 OS, with Indian company
Karbonn Mobiles announcing a tablet priced at around $125 and using
Google's latest OS, which is code-named Jelly Bean.
The Smart Tab 1 tablet is the second with Android 4.1 after
Google's
Nexus 7 was announced in late June. At $125, the price is lower than
that of Nexus 7, which starts at $199. The Smart Tab 1 is available in
India, according to MIPS, which made the announcement on behalf of
Karbonn.
The tablet has a 7-inch screen and runs on a single-core MIPS
processor at a clock speed of 1.2GHz. It has a 2-megapixel front camera,
3G support through a dongle, and seven hours of battery life while
surfing and eight hours of battery on video. Information on the internal
storage was not available, though Karbonn said on its website that the tablet has 32GB of expandable storage. The extra storage will likely come through a micro-SD slot.
The tablet's specifications pale in comparison to Google's Nexus 7,
which has a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, a 7-inch high-resolution
screen and up to 16GB of internal storage. Other companies like Asus
said tablet upgrades to Android 4.1 would come in due course.
The Smart Tab 1 is the first Android 4.1 tablet to be available with a processor from MIPS, which two weeks ago said
it had accelerated the port of the OS to work with its processors. On
behalf of tablet maker Ainol, MIPS late last year surprised industry
watchers by announcing a $99 tablet with Android 4.0 based on its
processor. The $99 tablet was the cheapest and among the first with
Android 4.0 at the time, but Google this year jumped ahead and shipped
the first Android 4.1 device with Nexus 7.
Karbonn Mobiles said an over-the-air update to Android 4.1 will be
delivered to existing Smart Tab 1 customers, but did not specify a
timeline. The company hopes to sell 200,000 tablets per month.
Tablets
with MIPS processors are largely under $150, and the few models
available have not been popular despite the low price. MIPS a few weeks
ago said a new 7-inch tablet called Miumiu W1 from Chinese company Ramos
would become available in a few months in India, Latin America and
Europe. The tablet has a 1.2GHz MIPS processor, a front camera, a
microSD slot for expandable storage, and 4GB or 8GB of storage.
MIPS is competing against ARM, whose processors go into most tablets
such as Apple's iPad. Most of the application development is geared to
ARM, and users have complained about application incompatibility on MIPS
tablets. MIPS is addressing the issue by working with partners, and
said popular Android applications like Fruit Ninja now work with MIPS
processors. MIPS is also working with Opera Software for browser
applications to work on MIPS tablets.
In May, MIPS released a new generation of processors called Aptiv,
which will replace the current crop of processors used in tablets. The
new processors are more power efficient and faster, and comparable to
current ARM processors in performance, according to analysts. Devices
with the latest Aptiv cores could be released as early as a year from
now, MIPS has said.
Source : http://www.pcworld.com
Source : http://www.pcworld.com
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